Uzo Egonu

(Nigerian, 1931-1996)

Still Life

Footnotes

Provenance
A private collection, UK.

Born in 1931, Uzo Egonu left Nigeria at the age of 13 to complete his schooling in England where he then studied fine art and design at the Camberwell School of Arts and Crafts, London between 1949 and 1952. Unlike many of his Nigerian contemporaries similarly educated in Britain, Egonu chose to remain in London where, apart from a year spent in Paris in 1953, he lived and worked for the rest of his life.

Still Life (1980) was painted at the height of Egonu's mature period when he had adapted his practice to accommodate changes in his visual perception. Following the critical success of his paintings in Britain in the 1950s and 60s, Egonu embarked upon a decade of printmaking. By 1979, his sight had been severely damaged by toxic fumes emitted from the oxidisation of materials employed in the etching process. His vision was so severely compromised that he had to mix colours from memory and used a rolled black tube to focus his sightline in order to assess the arrangement of elements in a painting. He consequently termed this period of artmaking 'Painting in Darkness' (Egonu quoted in O. Oguibe, 1995: p. 40).

Despite the pragmatic challenges faced by the artist, works from this period are rich in colour. Egonu produced a number of still life paintings in the early 1980s with dynamic compositions that evidence a continuation of his experiment with line, form, and perspective. As in the present work, the domestic objects typically employed as the subject of the still life are rendered unfamiliar as they are abstracted beyond recognition. Two rounded forms are connected by grey lines which carry the eye across the canvas, while the depth of field is flattened so that subject and background are expressed as unified tessellated geometric forms. Passages of solid colour are juxtaposed with lively patterns, transforming the everyday scene into a formalist expression of pictorial elements.

Egonu's treatment of the still life genre evokes Western modes of modernist abstraction encountered by the artist in London. Crucially, however, this body of work also references the Igbo textile design familiar to the artist from his childhood in Nigeria. This dual referential framework demonstrates the artist's ambition to move beyond the confines of a European modernism, finding African cultures to be 'as rich and engaging [a source] as any other' (Egonu quoted in O. Oguibe, 1995: p. 61). Drawing upon the aesthetics of the Cubist movement, Nigerian ornamentation, and 1960s British Pop Art, the present work rejects naturalism to express Egonu's unique artistic vision. His aptitude for printmaking is reflected in the graphic simplification of form which echoes a series of screenprints created contemporaneously to Still Life in the early 1980s. The prints feature female figures undertaking a range of household activities including reading and darning fabric, illustrating the artist's investigation of domestic themes in this period. The juxtaposition of West-African inspired patterns with geometric fields of solid colour in both his painterly and printmaking practices encapsulate the artist's bold approach to representation in this period.

Egonu achieved critical acclaim during his lifetime. His work has been included in several landmark exhibitions including The Other Story at the Hayward Gallery in 1989 which explored the work of black artists living and working in twentieth-century Britain. Today, his work is held in important public institutions including the V&A and the Tate Collection, both in London.

Bibliography
Olu Oguibe, Uzo Egonu: An African Artist in the West (London, 1995).